The Pixie once developed a remarkable bond with a broken and rusty scooter I picked up from the hard rubbish and let her ride a short distance to see if it was worth buying her a new one of her own. A few months later, my husband found it down the side of the house and asked if he could use it to fashion a spare part for his motorbike (he’s a regular MacGyver, that one). The Pixie was outraged.

“Not Sparkly!!” she howled and proceeded to cry for half an hour. Yes, half an hour. Over a piece of scrap metal she’d only met for five minutes. And apparently given a name to.

So you can imagine we had to be very careful whenever we spoke in her presence about selling The Love Bus. In the end, we told her it had been “borrowed”. Which, when you think about it, is how the Love Bus’s new owner might like to think of our transaction if it ends up giving him half the trouble it gave us.

Anyway, I realised the other day that I hadn’t blogged about the Love Bus since January’s ‘Trouble‘ post – mostly because it had cast a long dark shadow on my very soul (and the front lawn). And, indeed, I realised that there are many things that I blog about and then never mention again.

So it’s time to do a kind of ‘end of the (Australian) tax year inventory’ – an NDM ‘State Of The Union’, if you will.

For the record:

My hair hasn’t faded, despite multiple washes in anti-dandruff shampoo, and my beige skunk stripe is coming along nicely, thank you very much. Many of my friends have said they like the new colour on me but my husband has never – and will never – speak of it. It’s like my hair is dead to him. I suspect that in his heart of hearts, he just wants me to have long blonde hair – which might come as a huge surprise to anyone who actually knows me. I’m just not a ‘long blonde hair’ kind of girl…

My husband still has a beard and, quite possibly, will continue to have one until I have grown my hair long and blonde.

Thanks to Madame Zap’s enlightening comment on my post ‘My Husband Vs. The State Revenue Office‘, we received a refund cheque for $605 a couple of weeks ago. Interestingly enough they made the cheque out to my husband, even though it had been I (in my capacity as equal owner of the property in question) who had written all the correspondence and made all the phone calls to precipitate that cheque’s sweet arrival. Either they had read my post and been a’feared of my husband’s litigatious wrath, or they’re still stuck in the 1950s. I’ll let you be the judge.

After a very shaky start, Tiddles is now fully toilet trained. He still likes to ‘paint the town yellow’ from time to time but as far as I’m concerned, we’re out of nappies forever and I flip the BABY aisle in the supermarket the finger every time I pass it.

I put notes in my daughter’s lunchbox for the first two months of school before slowly and ever-so-gently weaning her off them – i.e. I forgot one day, she didn’t mention it and I never put another note in her lunchbox again.

Telstra didn’t fuck with me again after I wrote “A Telstra Of A Mess” but nor did anyone give me a free iPhone. With each passing day, I grow angrier and angrier that I am (seemingly) the only person on the planet without one. My lack of iPhone physically hurts me. I think this is what is called ‘A First World Problem’.

Finally, to update you on the opening paragraph of this post, ‘Sparkly’ is now officially ‘in storage’ and (unofficially) has been used to create (in my husband’s words) “a bracket to hold an electrical socket into which I can insert a standard ‘cigarette lighter’-type plug to connect my motorbike battery to a solar charger on the carport roof” which (in my words) “doesn’t actually work and was a waste of good scrap metal”. Oh, Sparkly!